Docket number: 123720 (Oklahoma Supreme Court)

HLLI’s Center for Class Action Fairness represents the minor children of attorney Bryan Cleveland in an appeal challenging a $9.3 million attorneys’ fee award approved as part of the settlement of the Integris Health data breach litigation. The appeal seeks vacatur of the fee award, which represents more than five times the attorneys’ ordinary billing rates, and a remand requiring the district court to conduct the independent review of attorneys’ fees required by Oklahoma law.

The underlying lawsuit arose from a 2023 cybersecurity incident affecting Integris Health, Oklahoma’s largest nonprofit health system, in which unauthorized actors allegedly patients’ personal and protected health information and sent them alarming emails attempting to extort money from them by including their social security numbers and other identifying information. After limited litigation and mediation, the parties reached a settlement creating a $30 million common fund to compensate class members with claims, pay settlement administration costs, and fund any credit-monitoring requested by class members, and pay court-approved attorneys’ fees. Cleveland does not challenge the fairness of that settlement; his appeal concerns only the subsequent award of $9.3 million in attorneys’ fees to class counsel.

The district court awarded approximately 31% of the $30 million common fund—representing nearly a 5.9× multiplier over class counsel’s claimed hourly rates without explaining why such an extraordinary enhancement was reasonable. The order granting this windfall for attorneys did not even remark upon, much less explain the award, which appears to be among the highest fee awards on an hourly basis ever granted by an Oklahoma state court.

The opening brief argues that the fee application rested on an inadequate evidentiary record. Class counsel did not provide contemporaneous billing records or sufficient evidence to verify their asserted lodestar or hourly rates, despite Cleveland’s objection. Only at the fairness hearing did counsel argue that the settlement should instead be valued at “over $49 million” based, apparently, upon speculative values assigned to credit monitoring and future cybersecurity improvements, but class counsel previously had consistently described the settlement as a $30 million non-reversionary common fund.

Attorneys’ fees in class actions are paid from money that otherwise belongs to absent class members. Because class counsel negotiate their own compensation while simultaneously representing the class, courts serve as fiduciaries charged with independently protecting absent class members’ interests.

This appeal asks the Oklahoma Supreme Court to clarify the procedures district courts must follow before approving common-fund fee awards, including what findings are necessary to permit meaningful appellate review and what evidence is required to support large lodestar multipliers. In the vast majority of appeals, the Oklahoma Supreme Court will assign the case to an appellate court panel.

Cleveland hopes to enhance the money available to class members like his minor children.

Case Documents